eighteenth year devoted all her care and energies to me with the most
wonderful abnegation of self, never even taking one day's holiday. I
adored, though I was greatly in awe of her. She really seemed to have no
thought but for me.... She was in her eighty-seventh year." This constancy
and permanency in the family relations were in themselves inestimable
boons to the child, who thus grew up in an atmosphere of familiar
affection and unshaken trust, for the absence of which nothing in the
world could have compensated. Another lady of higher rank was of necessity
appointed governess to the Queen in 1831, when she became next heir to the
throne. This lady, the Dowager Duchess of Northumberland, appears also as
the Queen's friend in after life.

The late Bishop Wilberforce was told by Dr. Davys an interesting anecdote
of his former pupil. "The Queen always had from my first knowing her a
most striking regard to truth. I remember when I had been teaching her one
day, she was very impatient for the lesson to be over--once or twice
rather refractory. The Duchess of Kent came in, and asked how she had
behaved. Lehzen said, 'Oh, once she was rather troublesome.' The Princess
touched her and said, 'No, Lehzen, twice, don't you remember?' The Duchess
of Kent, too, was a woman of great truth."

It had been judged meet that the future Queen should not be made aware of
her coming greatness, which, for that matter, continued doubtful in her
earlier years. She was to grow up free from the impending care and
responsibility, happy and healthful in her unconscious girlhood--above
all, unassailed by the pernicious attempts to bespeak her favour, the
crafty flattery, the undermining insinuations which have proved the bane
of the youth of so many sovereigns. In order to preserve this reticence,
unslumbering care and many precautions were absolutely necessary. It is
said the Princess was constantly under the eye either of the Duchess of